You've been busy collecting subscribers and growing your list over the years. Without you even noticing it, the occasional lousy email address may make its way onto your list. Sending emails to them could harm your domain reputation and deliverability because of hard bounces or spam complaints.
That's where email list cleaning comes into the picture.
What is email list cleaning?
Email list cleaning is a process that checks and detects bad email addresses in the CSV file that you upload and cleans them up.
Bad email addresses include outdated, misspelled or invalid email addresses, among other things.
What are the benefits of using email list cleaning services?
Cleaning your email list
improves your sender reputation and deliverability
reduces your bounce rates and
prevents spam signups.
Email scrubbing is typically a paid service and the cost depends on the size of the email list that you want to be checked and have cleaned.
But here at Flodesk, email list cleaning is free for all Flodesk members.
How and when does Flodesk clean your subscriber list?
Flodesk will perform a check for all subscriber sources including:
Subscriber import via CSV
Sync via Flodesk API including partner integration + API-key
Manual creation
Form opt-in
Opt-in via a checkout
Our real-time Email Validation API verifies your email addresses through a variety of methods, such as syntax validation, inbox availability, spam trap detection, role-based email detection and more.
Note: Role-based addresses are usually company emails assigned to a job position rather than an individual. These addresses are often overseen by multiple people and can eventually become inactive. Due to their association with high bounce rates and spam complaints, we exclude them from being imported via a CSV.
Such role-based email addresses that are removed during a CSV upload include:
abuse@admin@billing@compliance@contact@customerservice@data@devnull@dns@ftp@hostmaster@hr@info@inoc@ispfeedback@ispsupport@list-request@list@maildaemon@noc@no-reply@noreply@null@phish@phishing@postmaster@privacy@recruit@registrar@root@security@spam@support@sysadmin@tech@undisclosed-recipients@unsubscribe@usenet@uucp@webmaster@www@
Important: Subscribers with role-based addresses can still join your emailing list via a double opt-in form to ensure permission passed.
How can I find out which email addresses have been "cleaned"?
To see email addresses that have been cleaned, go to Audience > All subscribers and use the Filters. You can then see all cleaned email addresses and export them into a CSV but you can't send them emails through Flodesk.
Note: If an email address repeatedly soft bounces, the address will eventually be considered a hard bounce and cleaned from your audience. Subscribers will be marked as “cleaned” in case of repeated soft bounces, when
A subscriber has 6 soft bounces with no activity
A subscriber has 15 soft bounces with previous activity
A subscriber hasn’t opened an email in 12 months and has over 15 mailbox full bounces
Summary
When you upload a new CSV file to Flodesk, we automatically check your list and filter out bad email addresses. Unlike elsewhere, this email list cleaning service is free for all Flodesk members. You can find cleaned email addresses by using the Filter on the Audience > All subscribers page.